Recent advances of routing algorithms have greatly improved the reliability and efficiency of vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs). But the constraints of network resources result in a trade-off between reliable data transmission and the performance of routing protocols. Rather than relaying data via intensive routing procedures, the distributed technology can spread data source over multiple cooperative components to facilitate the data access. Particularly, decentralized ledger technology (DLT), which is in essence a distributed technology, incorporates all the participants to maintain and synchronize the full copy of data. Coupled with the consensus mechanism, it guarantees the preservation of trustworthy data. These two key features of DLT contribute a more reliable data delivery. However, in VANETs, due to the locomotion of vehicles, the participants of DLT frequently adjust their physical connection, and thus interrupt their data transmission. In this paper, we propose a novel framework, where the VANET is built upon the virtualization of DLT (vDLT), to achieve seamless and reliable data transmission. In the proposed framework, components in VANETs are equipped to run vDLT nodes, which disseminate data in the virtualization layer; thus, the variation of physical layout is transparent to the data transmission via vDLT. Simulation results are presented to show the effectiveness of the proposed framework.
Vehicular ad hoc networks (VANET) are also known as intelligent transportation systems. VANET ensures timely and accurate communications between vehicle to vehicle (V2V) and vehicle to infrastructure (V2I) to improve road safety and enhance the efficiency of traffic flow. Due to its open wireless boundary and high mobility, VANET is vulnerable to malicious nodes that could gain access into the network and carry out serious medium access control (MAC) layer threats, such as denial of service (DoS) attacks, data modification attacks, impersonation attacks, Sybil attacks, and replay attacks. This could affect the network security and privacy, causing harm to the information exchange within the network by genuine nodes and increase fatal impacts on the road. Therefore, a novel secure trust-based architecture that utilizes blockchain technology has been proposed to increase security and privacy to mitigate the aforementioned MAC layer attacks. A series of experiment has been conducted using the Veins simulation tool to assess the performance of the proposed solution in the terms of packet delivery ratio (PDR), end-to-end delay, packet loss, transmission overhead, and computational cost.
Mesh networks are widely used to provide flexible communication support for spatially distributed devices in Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS), such as UAS (Unmanned Aerial Systems) swarms. In the mesh network for UAS, a critical factor causing security concern is its routing strategy, especially for enabling source routing without disclosing the mesh network's sensitive topology among participants. Besides, conventional UAS networks are vulnerable to malicious participants which broadcast erroneous routing information. In this paper, we propose a blockchain-based approach to enable UAS in mesh networks to collect, aggregate and redistribute routing information with a secure and trustworthy manner. Our method can avoid the disclosure of sensitive network topology in the presence of compromised peers. Evaluations show that our approach outperforms the conventional method in terms of information security.
To improve mobile users' quality-of-experience (QoE) in the mobile cyber-physical system (MCPS), caching layered-coding contents on edge nodes that are close to mobile users has been advocated as a promising solution, which can efficiently lower the content delivery delay and mitigate the overhead of backhaul network. However, due to the complexity of trust management and the limited caching capacities of edge nodes, designing an efficient edge caching scheme for mobile users becomes a challenge. Meanwhile, the content caching in MCPS also faces some security problems, where edge nodes may return incorrect results or viruses to mobile users, and mobile users would deliberately refuse to pay for caching services. To tackle these problems, we propose a novel blockchain-based trustworthy edge caching scheme for mobile users in MCPS. Specifically, we first exploit blockchain to supervise the caching transactions between the edge nodes and mobile users in a distributed manner, whereby the caching service information cannot be modified and denied by any entities. Furthermore, we devise a trust management mechanism for mobile users to search the trustworthy caching services from diversified edge nodes, where the trust degree of the edge node is real-time evaluated and updated by mobile users based on the quality of caching service. To take full advantage of caching resources, we design a max-min-based resource allocation algorithm, with which the trustworthy edge node could fairly allocate its caching resource based on mobile users' optimal demands. The simulation results show that the presented scheme not only improves the utilities of edge nodes but also increases the QoE of mobile users.
With the continuous development of blockchain technology, more and more blockchain projects use semi-distributed P2P network structures. Although original gossip algorithm can be devoted to data synchronization in semi-distributed blockchain network, it can not be well applied to actual network environment. Since the probability of selecting a target node during data synchronization is fixed, it is inevitable that a message can be sent to a duplicate node. It will not only cause a lot of redundant messages, but also bring inefficient data synchronization. To address this problem, this paper proposes an improved HNA-Gossip algorithm which can reduce the probability of selecting duplicate nodes to send messages by recording historical node information dynamically. The simulation results show that, compared with the original gossip algorithm, various aspects of HNA-Gossip algorithm perform better.
Saiprasanth Krishnamoorthy, Albert P. Go, Ashlee Tiwari, Vikram Kapila
This paper develops a distributed technique to populate the network graph of a decentralized multi-robot system (MRS) by employing a consensus protocol for extracting the identities and states of each robot's neighbors in the MRS. A dark-room exchange (DRE) technique is proposed wherein each robot uses its on-board 2D LiDAR for range sensing and peer-to-peer communication to identify and track neighboring objects. The resulting information is utilized to build and maintain a distributed ledger populated with the information of the MRS network graph structure to facilitate supervision by human operators. The system is tested in a simulated environment consisting of TurtleBot3 robots scattered in a 2D plane. Using the results of simulation, an analysis of the speed and performance of the DRE technique is conducted that illustrates high reliability and fast response times. The paper concludes with a discussion of the future scope of this research for multi-robot/swarm applications.
Md. Abdur Rahman, Md. Mamunur Rashid, Stuart J. Barnes, Syed Maruf Abdullah
In this paper, we propose a secure internet of vehicles (IoV) framework that can handle the transportation ecosystem of a very large and dynamic crowd. The framework will allow personalized and location-aware vehicle IoT data to store in blockchain and off-chain repositories for secure sharing with one's community of interest. As a test case of our proposed application, we have developed distributed smartphone applications that can be interfaced with the OBD-II interface to collect in-vehicle data from the CAN bus of a vehicle and an ambient intelligent environment consisting of IoT devices. The in-vehicle environment can collect vehicle sensory information, process the sensory data within the mobile edge network and store the transactions and the raw sensory data to blockchain and off-chain repositories through secure digital wallets. Finally, we will present our implemented framework and initial test results.
In this paper, the security problem for mobile satellite communication networks (MSNET) has been investigated. With the rapidly growth of communication needs, mobile satellite systems represent a significant solution to provide high-quality communication services to mobile users in under-populated regions, in emergency areas, on planes, trains and ships. However, lacking an effective framework to secure mobile satellite communication networks seriously limited the practicality of satellite services. Therefore, a new security framework have been developed in this paper to address the security challenges in mobile satellite communication network. Firstly, the mobile satellite communication networks have been formulated as delay-tolerance network (DTN). Then, the blockchain technique has been adopted and used in two aspects, i.e. 1) integrating with DTN structure to secure the data communication, 2) combing with the practical satellite constellation management algorithm to defend the unexpected cyber attacks physically. Through integrating emerging blockchain techniques with both communication and physical aspects, the developed framework cannot only effectively detect the cyber attacks, but also better defend the mobile satellite communication networks through communication and satellite management aspects. Eventually, the numerical simulation and experimental tests have been provided to demonstrate the effectiveness of developed MSNET-Blockchain framework.
Kai Lei, Qichao Zhang, Junjun Lou, Bo Bai · 5 authors
Named data networking (NDN) enables fast and efficient content dissemination in mission-critical unmanned aerial vehicle ad hoc networks (UAANETs); however, its in-network caching mechanism brings a new security challenge: content poisoning. Poisoned content can contaminate the cache on the routers and isolate valid content from the network, leading to performance degradation or denial of service. To mitigate such attacks and enhance network-layer trust of NDN-based UAANETs, this article proposes a novel and systematic framework that integrates interest-key-content binding (IKCB), forwarding strategy, and on-demand verification to efficiently discover poisoned content. To further provide decentralized IKCB store and detect internal attackers, we introduce a lightweight permissioned blockchain system over NDN and develop a scalable adaptive delegate consensus algorithm. Our experimental results have demonstrated that our proposed framework can effectively purge poisoned content with low overhead, and our algorithms achieve great performance to fit UAANETs.
The benefits of blockchain technology are evident in the banking industry as the underlying technology for cryptocurrencies. Recently, research has been focused on novel, non-cryptocurrency uses of blockchain for other industries such as national defense. Application of these technologies in military use cases requires special consideration of the limitations inherent to tactical military operations, namely the network communication technologies. In this work we explore the performance of blockchain technologies on network environments representative of those available in Department of Defense (DoD) tactical operations. Our experimentation with the Ethereum blockchain on a mobile network emulation reveals a series of verbose blockchain network communication protocols as well as a heavy reliance on Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) for block transfer and synchronization that may limit the effectiveness of blockchain on current DoD mobile ad hoc networks.
Caching and sharing contents among mobile devices via wireless device-to-device (D2D) communications is a promising way to offload data traffic. In order to encourage more content sharing among mobile devices, we propose a blockchain incentive scheme in this paper, where the base station (BS) can allocate computing power to mine blockchain in a period of time and give this mining profit to the mobile devices that share contents with others via D2D communication. In order to maximize the total profit, we develop the caching placement schemes considering different relationships between the allocated computing power and the shared data size. For the linear relationship, we can obtain the closed form expression of the optimal caching scheme and find that the mobile device prefers to cache the popular contents. For the nonlinear relationship, the optimal problem can be effectively solved by difference of convex (DC) programming and the results reveal that the mobile device prefers to caching different contents.
Muhammad Saad, Laurent Njilla, Charles Kamhoua, Joongheon Kim · 6 authors
In this paper, we present a new form of attack that can be carried out on the memory pools (mempools) of blockchain-based cryptocurrencies. Towards that end, we study such an attack on Bitcoin mempool and explore its effects on transactions fee paid by legitimate users. We also propose countermeasures to contain such an attack. Our countermeasures include fee-based and age-based designs, which optimize the mempool size and help in countering the effects of DDoS attacks. We further evaluate our designs by simulations and analyze their usefulness in varying attack conditions. Our analyses can be extended to other blockchain-based applications which use memory pools to cache network activities.
About 1Bn people around the globe are born and live without identity documents. In addition, displaced people, projected at 1Bn within a generation, often find themselves without worthy identity documentation even if they had any in their country of origin.
Given that centralized, top-down identity-granting solutions are failing a large portion of the world population, a bottom-up, grassroots, decentralized solution that allows every human being to create and own a trustworthy \emph{genuine global identity} is an urgent necessity. Such a bottom-up solution is worthy only if it is resilient to malicious antagonists that create fake and duplicate identities (so called \emph{sybils}). Furthermore, for a solution to be truly grassroots, the people that rely on it for their global identity should also be its sovereign. Hence its governance has to be sybil-resilient as well.
Here, we present a foundation for a decentralized, grassroots, bottom-up, self-sovereign process in which every human being may easily create and own a genuine global identity, realized as a public key. The solution relies on the formation of a Web of Trust among global identities, but does not rely on biometrics, nor does it require to store any personal information on public or even third-party storage, except for the public key itself. The approach is designed for natural realization using distributed ledger/blockchain technology. For the solution to be complete, additional components are needed, including a mechanism that encourages honest behavior and an egalitarian cryptocurrency to fuel the mechanism. These are a subject for future research.
Social networking sites have given users unprecedented opportunities for the generation and dissemination of content. A variety of social networking sites exist for different purposes, to afford users a range of anonymous and non-anonymous options for self-expression, and the ability to be a part of a virtual community. These “affordances” enable users to create and share content; however, the ability to partially or wholly detach user identity from the content has resulted in unique challenges for content access and content attribution. This paper proposes a framework for secure, trustworthy social networking that also creates value for user-generated content by using a blockchain-enhanced framework for social networking. This work explains the application of such a framework for collocated spaces of robots and IoT devices and identifies key challenges that result as a consequence of merging social networking sites and blockchain technology.
Sara Falcone, Yingsheng Zhang, Agnes Cameron, Amira Abdel-Rahman
This paper proposes a blockchain-based mapping protocol for distributed robotic systems running on embedded hardware. This protocol was developed for a robotic system designed to locomote on lattice structures for space applications. A consensus mechanism, Proof of Validity, is introduced to allow the effort of mining blocks to correlate with the desired tasks the robotic system was designed for. These robots communicate using peer-to-peer LoRa radio. Options, trade-offs and considerations for implementing blockchain technology on an embedded system with wireless radio communication are explored and discussed.
Alex Khawalid, Dan Acristinii, Hans van Toor, Eduardo Castelló Ferrer
Swarm Robotics (SR) faces a series of challenges impeding widespread adoption for real-world applications. Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) has shown it can solve a number of these challenges. An experiment was conducted to showcase the resolution of these challenges. A search and rescue mission was simulated using drones coupled with single board computers and several simulated agents. Inter-agent communications were facilitated through DLT in a completely decentralized network. A frontend interface was built to demonstrate the ease with which information can be extracted from the system. This paper shows the feasibility of the application of DLT to SR-related challenges in a practical experiment. For future work, it is proposed to focus on more complex tasks through federated learning or inter-swarm communications, possibly through Cosmos.
While direct allocation of spectrum and evolved medium access protocols provide a base for ubiquitous wireless connectivity, the existing TCP/IP and OSI models were designed for wired networks and do not address open interconnection of air interfaces. Without an interconnection model for the air interface, existing network designs continue to tie wireless medium access to that of the backhaul provider for ownership of access and identity trust, resulting in limitations on functionality and coverage. In this paper, we propose a novel solution to access ownership and identity trust by extending the TCP network standard, under a new model we propose, named TCP-Air which integrates distributed ledger technologies directly at the air interface. Further, we present two use cases of the TCP-Air model, demonstrating applications not feasible under existing permissioned-access network designs.
Ajayi Oluwashina Joseph, Joseph Raffety, Philip Morrow, Lin Zhiwei · 7 authors
The proliferation of the Internet of Things has seen it adopted to practically all aspects of life. There has been an increase in demand for more IoT devices which are manufactured by several companies. This has however left need to address vulnerabilities within and threats to these devices. In many cases, these vulnerabilities arise from manufacturer focus on functionality rather than security. Secure by design IoT devices are rare in the market today. Efforts to address this are being made by the IoT research community, however, more effort is required. Deficiencies of current efforts include accountability of devices and privacy of data generated across the IoT landscape. The aim of this Ph.D. research is to improve the security, privacy, veracity, and trust. The approach developed in this study will be based on non-repudiation of actions among self-organized IoT devices in an IoT Ecosystem by leveraging Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT). A proposed system architecture which relies on the Distributed Ledger Technology and its related features will enable services to be applied to the IoT landscape to achieve aspects of end to end IoT security. The initial progress to date is presented within this manuscript.
Swapnoneel Roy, Faustina J. Anto Morais, Mehrdad Salimitari, Mainak Chatterjee
Protecting and securing data that reside at various hosts in the Internet has become more important than ever before because of the growing number of cyber attacks. Though there have been several studies related to denial of service and cache attacks, those studies are primarily based on simulations and investigations of attacks on real networks are still lacking.
Delay tolerant network (DTN) is successfully proposed for setting up emergency post disaster communication networks when normal communication infrastructure is incapacitated. Performance of such networks get affected by selfish nodes that do not participate in message forwarding. Thus, nodes must receive satisfactory rewards for cooperation. The available incentive schemes either rely on central trusted authorities or do not use an explicit and secure digital currency. Blockchain, a decentralized digital ledger of immutable transactions, is an attractive approach for addressing the incentive challenges in peer-to-peer networks that lack central trusted authorities. Bitcoin, the Blockchain based cryptocurrency, make it possible to devise practical credit based incentive schemes for such networks. In this paper, we propose a Blockchain based incentive scheme for DTN based post disaster communication network that uses Bitcoin to incentivize nodes for cooperation. The scheme uses a novel reward strategy to bring rationality in the incentivizing process.